


Echinoidea

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Mental Institutions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-06
Updated: 2010-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:12:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Echinoidea, a subphylum of echinodermata, marine invertebrates that includes the sea urchins; creatures with a thousand eyes, all blind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echinoidea

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the pjo_kinkmeme. You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/91444.html).

-

 

The Thursday they let Annabeth go, they bring her an old, battered trunk they claim is hers. It has deep gouges in the wood, the lion's foot brass clasps worn white in places, turning green with age. She doesn't have a lot to pack, and the trunk is big enough that she can organize all her belongings in it effectively and according to color, form, and function, and still have room left over, leaving her sitting cross-legged on the shiny linoleum next to it, stroking the corners with ginger fingers, like she expects to be cut.

They come and lead her outside, where rain has blurred out the sky into a cold, gunmetal grey. The scent of wet pinesap hits her nose, sharp and acrid.

The parking lot is empty, spare for one small woman with a canary-yellow scarf, fragile gossamar spun around her neck. When she sees them, she pushes herself off the driver's side door of a little California hybrid, green with brown siding like the thorns off a rose. She's Asian-American, with hair soft-washed brown and eyes almond-shaped, and Annabeth can tell from the way she holds herself that she wouldn't know the first thing about holding her own in a fight. Reads it as clear in the lines of her shoulders and hips like they've been typeset in newspaper block letters.

_Your half-sister, honey,_ goes the nurse in green who has Annabeth's elbow in her warm hand, more habit than need for restraint. Annabeth hasn't had a restraint day in a very, very long time. _Adriana. She's gonna take you home now, all right?_

Adriana looks hopeful, and not even rain can mute the bright flecks of light in her eyes.

Annabeth smiles, says, _Nice to meet you._

 

•

She likes Adriana's apartment right off, but she knows it's all wrong. The drain-pipes are in an awkward place, gonna make the roof leak in ten years. The bathroom's awkwardly squeezed between the kitchen and the first bedroom, with pipes on the wrong side of the wall -- Adriana explains that if you need to use the bathroom at night, don't flush, because it's loud enough to wake everybody up, and Annabeth doesn't doubt her. The room would have been better off as a linen closet, but she likes the deep blue of the wallpaper. It's a room she could get lost in, all that blue saying _shush_ when her mind remembers things that couldn't have happened.

In the living room, she goes straight for the bookshelves, deep approval humming in her chest because there are so many of them. They're cluttered, books crooked from being pulled out and put back in a hurry; some have loose bits of paper stuck in them, peeking out of the pages and bent roughly at the edges. There are several model airplanes in there, too, sitting in front of hard-backed aerospace theory textbooks. The affection that sparks low between her ribs is immediate, and she knocks the propeller of one with her knuckle.

_Those were Dad's,_ offers Adriana from behind her, and Annabeth nods like this means something.

A little while later, a young man comes in, dragging his limbs behind him like they've grown too long too fast for him to know exactly where they are. Annabeth tries not to tense at the sound of the lock scraping, because she's learned that tends to make people nervous, and she has to care now what other people think.

_This is Adam,_ Adriana says quickly, taking a step forward to place herself between Annabeth and the guy who just walked in, but it's unconscious: she may not have a fighting instinct, but she does have the knee-jerk need to protect those younger than her. _Our brother._

Adam offers her a curious smile, wary but not unfriendly, and she likes the honesty in his face, which is the same coffee-cream Eurasian blend that Adriana's is. She offers him a bright smile of her own, glad for it. Just one day, and she gets a sister and a brother all her own. It's almost enough to put her on guard, because what has she done recently to warrant such a treat? What is she expected to do for it? What if they take them away? She doesn't think she could stand that.

_All our names begin with A,_ she notes, thinking this is a safe observation, as Adam carefully puts a clear plastic bag down on the table. It's full of candy.

Adriana nods, accepting the remark for what it is. _Dad liked A names._

Athena is an A name, Annabeth thinks, and then wonders why she thought that. Her mind does that to her a lot, and she almost doesn't notice anymore. She's careful not to let it show on her face.

_I brought --_ Adam starts, and holds up the bag again. _Remember, we always use to take the Bart down to Pier 39 when you'd come home in the fall, and we'd feed the sea lions and eat salt water taffy. So I brought some home for us. I thought you might like some. The pineapple flavor's new, I think._

 

•

Her bed doesn't have rails. It doesn't have straps. There aren't any tight, hospital corners and blankets worn white in the middle from people she never knew. Instead, there's a quilt, off-white with a design pale-green and plant-like, curling around the large diamond patterns. She runs her hands over the stitching, too loose to be machine-made, and feels kind of warm and sloppy, like she's too close to the atmosphere.

She orbits a lot, she thinks, back and forth and in circles and spinning elliptical around something too great for her to get her mind around, out there in deep, dark space. Good days, bad days, hot and cold, days where she is on the wrong side of Venus, burning underneath her skin with the urge to get up, get out, _do_ something, and her mind is too sharp and fractal bright with images of strange creatures, teeth and claws and many heads. Days where she thinks nothing, one second to the next, lost in the icy moons of Jupiter.

She puts the battered trunk at the foot of the bed.

Adriana comes in while she's still sitting on top of it, holding herself still in the lengthening evening shadows, heedless of the dark and basking in the sunlight she can feel so clearly inside of her. _They told me that you lost your memories --_ she starts, and Annabeth quirks a smile at her, because that's a cute way of putting it.

Her memories aren't lost. They're still there, like shapes in her peripheral vision, pushing at her mind like they're just on the other side of a shower curtain, and some days she orbits close enough to them that she thinks she could have them back, if she really tried. But they kept telling her, every day, that there's now way she remembers what she remembers, because it couldn't have happened, and she's making it up. She's learned to ignore it when her memories call to her.

_\-- but we could try to contact some of your old friends from camp, if you want?_ Adriana shifts her weight, eyes darting to the light switch like she wants to turn it on, but is afraid of invading Annabeth's space so soon.

Annabeth knows she has friends. Most people do, she's learned, so she assumes she has some as well. It's just, they don't feel quite real to her, like the edge of space; out there, somewhere, so far distant they're more concept than proven fact, impossible to comprehend.

Easier to forget, that way.

Everyone just wants her to forget.

 

•

She doesn't remember what she did that got her sent to the Yinsen Memorial Correctional Facility; that part of her memories has blurred away like rain on a windowpane, to where it just always was _there,_ always been there, like her dishwater blonde hair and her ability to catch tennis balls one-handed and the way she feels more relaxed in an orange t-shirt. 

She tried to escape no fewer than four times, with less enthusiasm as time went on. Her first break-out attempt was arguably the most successful. She got out of the building and as far as the redwood forests before security caught up with her. Everyone frowned every time they saw her after that, and Kendra -- who slept two cells down and liked to tell people how she thought they'd taste with ketchup -- told her that trying to run away means you've got something to be guilty for.

They took away all her personal belongings. Including the cap. She doesn't remember why, but everything went downhill after she lost her baseball cap.

She knows she's lost something, some very, very key part of herself. But in order to feel your loss, you have to remember what it is.

She's better like this. That's what everybody tells her.

 

•

In October, they get the warmest heat wave on record for the Bay Area, and it's such a nice break from cold, dreary, and windy that Adriana and Adam insist she go out and enjoy herself. 

She agrees, because it's one of those normal things she should be doing.

There's a speaker in the Square, she knows; saw the bulletin for it in the Bart station three weeks ago, some Australian designer who wants to show everyone stateside his plans for some new underwater plaza, like something straight out of the Little Mermaid. Out to sea is the new frontier, he declares in his introductory speech. Everyone's off buying their property on Mars when there's a whole landscape of unexplored territory right off shore. _It can be done!_ he shouted with commendable zealotry, and brought up a slideshow of his concept sketches.

Sitting on a bench at the edge of the crowd, Annabeth is too far away to really see the details in his hypothetical underwater dome town, but she can tell right away that it's not going to work exactly like that. The glass dome is too wide; not enough of an arch to support the weight of seawater, and the decompression chambers where they'll bring in new supplies and visitors is on the wrong side: too much traffic on the shore side of the city would result in more reef destruction.

She has one of her father's books tucked under one arm, and she flips to one of the blank pages in the back and begins correcting the man's designs.

The walls of the city would have to be square for more solid support; maybe they could build terraces and walkways at the very edge, because what's the point of living underwater if you can't stare out to sea? There's the issue of trash and sewage, too; where are they going to put that?

_I like your idea better,_ a rumbly voice over her shoulder says, and the bench creaks as weight leans onto the back of it. _Although I'm against invading the ocean on principle._

She looks up, startled, and her eyes catch on the loud print of a Hawaiian shirt, casually unbuttoned just enough to give off that knee-knocking definition of fantastic abs. She registers the faint smell of sea brine, the far-off call of gulls, and dismisses it as fancy, before her gaze flicks up -- up and _up,_ because holy, this is a tall man -- to meet his.

Her breath jumps, because she _knows_ those eyes -- that dark shade of blue-green like seawater right after it rains, _has_ to know those eyes because they make all the suns and stars and icy moons retreat and retreat until she can't even see them through the atmosphere; she's back on Earth, cement underneath her feet and everything swimmingly bright. She knows those eyes the way she knows the model airplanes, the way she knows architecture, the way she knows how to breathe.

She has to know this man, she decides. Now it's only a matter of remembering him.

In the meantime, she gives him a smile as light as the sun off the surf.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
